Whether it’s turning on its creator in “Ex Machina”...
...or looking for love in “AI” or “Her”...
Hello, I’m here
Artificial intelligence permeates Hollywood’s blockbusters
I’ll be back
But now, with the arrival of chatbots like ChatGPT...
...suddenly AI seems a lot closer to fact than fiction
This has caused more excitement in the tech world...
...than anything for several years
But it’s still hard to separate the hype...
...from the fear-mongering...
...and informed concerns
Homogenised, simple responses that are wrong
To me that leads to some form of dystopia
So what do the new AI chatbots mean for the future of the internet...
...and our relationship with machines?
What is a chatbot?
Think of it like an internet search engine, although it works differently
To the user, it’s a text box where you type questions
It’s what it does next that makes it so special
Chatbots have been around for a while
You’ve probably talked to a really rubbish one at your bank...
...or maybe your mobile operator...
...but they’ve suddenly got a lot better...
...because of a new technology called generative AI
And this technology involves basically giving lots of examples...
...of either images or text to a machine-learning system...
...and it then learns to generate its own
If you use that in a chatbot, you get a much, much cleverer chatbot
Chatbots are trained on billions of texts from the internet
This allows them to learn which words are most likely...
...to follow other words in a sentence about any given subject
These chatbots are essentially like a very sophisticated version...
...of the autocomplete on your phone or on your email
So they’re kind of constantly playing the game of what’s the next word?
It sounds very simple, but it can produce these surprisingly lifelike...
...and intelligent-sounding results
And they don’t just answer questions
Generative AI chatbots can write essays, poems or songs
Some can even produce art or music from text prompts
But it’s the possibility that these new chatbots might disrupt...
...the lucrative search-engine business that’s been making waves lately
For most people, search engines, and Google in particular...
...are sort of the front door of the internet...
...and this has been true for about 25 years
If you want to look something up or find something out...
...that’s where you go first
But if you want to, I don’t know, figure out where to go on holiday...
...or understand the meaning of a technical term or get help writing an essay...
...then a chatbot might actually be more useful than a search engine
Silicon Valley is taking note
With Google’s revenue from search ads in 2021...
...reaching around $150bn...
...there’s a lot at stake
Microsoft and Google are adding chat functions to their existing search engines
And further afield, China’s Baidu has followed suit
Last year, venture capital investment in generative AI totalled over $1bn
Investors are hoping with this new tech, someone could steal Google’s crown
But not everyone is convinced
John Henshaw is the senior director of search engine optimisation at Vimeo
It’s his job to know search
Conversational AI is a solution in search of a problem
We don’t actually need it
Google already uses machine learning and AI
For accuracy, for factual information, to understand concepts
Conversational AI doesn’t do that
If chatbots don’t check facts, they can’t be relied on for search
A big problem with these AI chatbots is that they just sometimes get things wrong
What it’s doing is just sort of reflecting back to us stuff that’s already on the internet
It can sometimes combine different sources...
...to produce claims that aren’t actually true
When this happens, it’s known as a hallucination
Just like when a human hallucinates...
...a chatbot hallucination can seem realistic...
...but may in fact have no basis in reality
This is hardly surprising given that chatbots are trained on text from the internet...
...and a lot of what’s written online isn’t true
All these chatbots are doing is putting one word after another...
...based on the billions of words that they’ve already read on the internet...
...so they don’t really know anything or understand anything...
...and they have no idea of right or wrong or true or false
And that’s a problem
A chatbot doesn’t know the difference between an academic paper...
...and a fictional short story, so it’ll give both equal weight when giving you an answer...
...that it presents as fully accurate
And because they don’t know what they’re saying...
...chatbots can demonstrate other strange behaviours
Your chatbot at some point could express its love for you...
...if that’s how you continue prompting it...
...through a longer-term interaction
And like with anything, when you start to bond with someone...
...even if it’s an AI, you expect and want and desire...
...the bond in return
Ayanna Howard is an expert in AI...
...and a roboticist at Ohio State University
The way chatbots can change how we interact with machines...
...has been concerning her profession for some time
As far back as 1966...
...a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...Joseph Weizenbaum, described something called the “ELIZA effect”
ELIZA was a project that was designed by an MIT professor
He simulated a psychotherapist named Carl Rogers...
...who did things like reflective thinking and reflective listening
So if I said, Oh, gosh, I’m having a bad day...
...ELIZA would say, So tell me about this bad day
Volunteers interacting with ELIZA appeared to develop feelings for it...
...even though they knew it was a machine
Weizenbaum was so disturbed by what he saw...
...he became an open critic of AI
Language and communication is how we build bonds with each other
So between humans and humans...
...we can basically evoke certain reactions...
...by triggering either a positive or a negative emotional response
This behaviour can be learned...
...and so the chatbots of today...
...and continuously the chatbots of tomorrow...
...given that they understand language it would be very easy...
...to increase the bonds so that people actually believe...
...that they have a friendship or they have a relationship...
...with these chatbots
In 2015 my best friend passed away...
...and I found myself going back to our text messages...
...trying to remember him and how it was back when he was alive
The ELIZA effect can also be an opportunity
I used some of the AI models...
...we built to recreate my friend to be able to continue to talk to him as an AI
When Eugenia Kuyda recreated her best friend Roman as a chatbot...
...it was originally a personal project
But she soon realised...
...it wasn’t just her that could benefit from the companionship AI can offer
We saw that maybe there is a demand...
...and need for something that would be available to talk...
...24/7 about anything...
...that’s on your mind without being afraid of being judged
Eugenia’s company, Replika, offers paying customers...
...an AI companion in the form of a chatbot within a humanoid avatar
It’s a popular service with over 2m active users to date...
...and it’s gaining in popularity
Until recently there was even an option for bots to send not-safe-for work messages
Users know they’re chatting with a bot...
...but some still have feelings for their virtual friends or girlfriends
I think in the next ten years someone will build...
...something like “Her”, in a way, or Joi from “Blade Runner”
Do you want to dance or you want to open your present?
What present?
Every one of us will have this AI companion that’s always there with us...
...that you can talk to about your personal things...
...but also do things together with and watch Netflix in the evening together...
...and plan vacations and so on
Hi, I’m an avatar of Alex who directed this film
If you’re enjoying watching it...
...you might be interested to know that Economist subscribers...
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And now on with the film
While an AI companion might not be for everyone...
...in the future we’ll all still probably frequently interact with chatbots...
...but in a more mundane way
Your call is important to us
Customer-service representatives don’t always get respect when doing their job...
...but unlike humans, bots have infinite patience
Soon it might be more common to chat to a bot online than a human...
...and increasingly hard to tell the difference
There’s this idea of the Turing test, which is...
...can you tell whether text is coming from a machine...
...or from a real person?
And we’re already at a situation where machines can pass the Turing test...
...they do seem to be convincing as humans
Counterfeiting humans could be especially helpful...
...for customer-facing websites
Every single website with someone who’s willing to pay...
...would have their own chatbot...
...and so it would be customised to your customers
And these chatbots won’t just be supplying us with information
They’ll also be doing things for us
Jarvis, are you there? At your service, sir
It might still be some years before we get to Jarvis from the “Iron Man” films...
...but generative artificial intelligence...
...could make AI assistants much more common in the future
Chatbots could become the new way of getting things done
Things like booking flights...
...or finding a time where three or four people can have a meeting...
...and then booking the meeting in your calendar
So chatbots could be a more convenient way of doing that
When combined with a voice assistant...
...the result could be Siri on steroids...
...and it could change how we use the internet forever...
...by making it easier...
...for people to access the wealth of information and services available online
But currently chatbots aren’t quite reliable enough to be left to their own devices
And there are bigger worries too
The fact that it’s taking everybody else’s information...
...to me is an extreme form of copyright infringement
I see that as being ripe for lawsuits
Picture stock archive Getty Images is currently suing Stable Diffusion...
...a text-to-image AI generator, for scraping its content to produce its work...
...and trademark infringement
Other artists are suing other AI art generators...
...for collaging their work without consent
When it comes to text...
...chatbots may just parrot existing books or articles without any citation...
...amounting to plagiarism
And that’s not the only problem
I wish that copyright infringement...
...was my only concern with conversational AI
But it’s not. My biggest concern is its ability to make things up
Chatbots get things wrong a lot of the time...
...yet present what they’re saying as truth
If enough people use them, this could allow falsehoods...
...and misinformation to spread at a rapid rate
Chatbots have already come under fire...
...for putting forward racist...
...or otherwise bigoted opinions based on what they’ve read online
This tendency could be exploited
Chatbots could be used to implement the approach favoured by...
...Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon, which is called “flood the zone”...
...or flood the zone with shit...
...and this is where you put out so much misinformation about something...
...that the truth is actually drowned out
And if you can generate misinformation more easily using chatbots...
...then that becomes much easier
The problem of online misinformation could be just getting started...
...but it’s not just the falsehoods worrying people
The proliferation of chatbots could be detrimental...
...to the internet in another way
I think that society has the most to lose with the embrace...
...of conversational AI
It’s going to reduce our ability to learn and research...
...and have critical thought
If you can only chat with something and get a response back...
...then you’re essentially doing away with the open web
You are doing away with actually having choices
To me, that leads to some form of dystopia
People might be less inclined to post good stuff on the internet...
...because they’ll worry that it’s all just going to get hoovered up by a chatbot...
...and regurgitated to other people
If the best bits are just going to be served up directly by a chatbot...
...then you might say, Well, what’s the point? Why should I post anything at all?
There’s a danger that the internet might become a less vibrant space
Whatever happens, one thing seems certain...
...people will not only be talking to their machines more...
...but the machines will be talking back
The train has left the train station...
...and is going at 150 miles per hour
You are not going to stop it
What would be a good concluding...
...thought for this film in the style of The Economist?
As chatbots become more prevalent...
...we must grapple with the complex...
...implications of their impact on society
Balancing their potential benefits with the need to preserve...
...our humanity will be a crucial challenge for the future
You heard it here first
Do you think your job’s at risk?
I don’t think my job’s at risk
Thanks for watching
If you want to read more of our analysis of what generative AI...
...chatbots could mean for the future, click on the link
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